City of Dark Corners by Jon Talton (easy novels to read .TXT) 📕

Navarre, who either already knew where Zoogie roomed or had pried it out of him before running the razor across his carotid.

Sounds came out the partly closed window as the room was ransacked. What would I do next? I leaned against the old masonry, trying to make myself invisible as the window below came up and a fedora popped out. Frenchy? Muldoon? Don? I couldn’t tell. Damn, I couldn’t remember the hats worn at the junkyard. Its owner looked below, but not above. Somehow the decades-old ironwork of the fire escape didn’t creak or groan with me imposing on it. The window slammed shut.

I gave it a good fifteen minutes, then took the fire escape all the way down to the alley.

Out on the street, I leaned against the Professional Building and lit a nail to calm my nerves. I pulled out the envelope, and it had my name on it. Opening it, I found a single business card. Decorated with a saguaro cactus, it read:

Summer Tours

Cynthia

3–7222.

A big clue from a dead man. Maybe Zoogie had the presence of mind to know his room might be tossed if something went wrong, that he might be searched if he kept it on his person. So he gave it to the night clerk to place in his cubbyhole at the front desk.

Then I remembered the slip of paper from Zoogie’s pants pocket. I unfolded it and read a typed message:

Meet me at the Triple-A, midnight.

Walking across to the Hotel San Carlos, I found a phone booth and shut myself behind the folding door. Then I dialed the number on the card.

“Answering service.” A woman’s voice.

“Is this Summer Tours?”

“We’re their answering service.”

I leaned in. “This is Detective Hammons of the Phoenix Police Department.” Just to be safe, I gave Don’s badge number. “Are you Summer Tours or are you a commercial answering service?”

This got the woman’s attention. She said they answered for sixty clients, ranging from doctors to locksmiths. I asked about Summer Tours. I listened as she opened a drawer and thumbed through it.

Coming back in five minutes, she said Summer Tours had engaged them this past May, paying five dollars a month. But they had stopped paying in January and were in arrears.

“That happens often these days,” she said.

“Do you know what Summer Tours was?”

“Something to do with tourism, the girl who opened the account told me.”

I asked for a description: Young, blond hair, blue eyes, pretty. Cynthia Thayer. She paid three months ahead in cash. Customers would leave their names and phone numbers, and she would call daily to retrieve them.

“Would you happen to have a log of those calls and the numbers?”

“Oh, yes. We keep records for all our customers.”

I asked if I could take a look, expecting her to demand a warrant.

“Of course,” she said and gave me her address.

Sixteen

Victoria came over that night. She brought news from her visit to Tempe, too, carrying a box. She placed it beside the sofa and I poured us Scotch. Thanks to my name as an introduction, the registrar gave her this container that held Carrie’s belongings, left behind in her dorm last semester. Besides some clothes and shoes, it held a notebook of her writing, a diary, and letters.

“Jackpot,” I said.

She clinked my glass and sipped. “I hope so. I have another box of very expensive clothes still in the car. As for this, it will take some time to go through it. You have quite an admirer in that coed named Pamela.”

“She’s a kid.”

“I’m not jealous. Much.” She punched my shoulder. “I did some sorting this afternoon. A few letters from her father. Some from a neighbor in Prescott. She sent money to the woman to buy groceries for her dad. I guess it was a way to keep him from using the cash to buy booze or build another still. Then things got interesting. She had a number of love letters.”

“From her boyfriend, the one who works at the slaughterhouse?”

“They don’t read that way. Young men are needy. These are written with more assurance. I guess an older man or men.”

“Who?”

“That’s the problem. They’re only signed, ‘Your Admirer.’ And the envelopes they came in were discarded, so no return address or even a postmark. But do you have that note from Prescott, saying you were in dangerous territory?”

I went to the desk and retrieved it. Victoria pulled out one of the notes from Carrie’s things and leaned against me, holding them side by side.

“Different handwriting,” she said.

I read the note:

Dearest C.

I know you’ll be pleased with your cut this month, which I enclose. You can share it with your friends as they deserve. This will not go on forever. I promise. Keep trusting me. In the beginning, I remember that you were eager to try. But I sense you are having second thoughts. Hang in their, dearest. It won’t be much longer, and we’ll be set with a nice nest egg and we can run away and start a new life.

Your Admirer

I read it again. “What the hell does this mean?” I told her about what I had learned at the Biltmore, including her friend Margaret saying an older man would fetch her at night and that he was a cop. And our Carrie was going by Cynthia. Both starting with the letter C.

“Could she have been embezzling from the hotel?” I said.

“Maybe,” Victoria said. “Makes sense. Even in the hot months, I bet the Biltmore makes plenty. It might be involved with the speakeasy out there. But what about ‘share it with your friends’?”

I shook my head. “Maybe she needed help for the inside job. It still doesn’t explain her nightly jaunts. Unless the man was her lover and somehow involved in skimming the money. Maybe he put her up to it. Married man, promising to leave his wife if they got enough.”

Victoria shrugged. “Maybe. Still, it doesn’t seem right.”

“How so?”

“I can’t put my finger on it, Eugene. Woman’s intuition. We need to read